Editor’s note: Grist is hosting a free virtual event on January 9, 2025 at 14:00 EST / 11:00 PST to analyze the progress and challenges seen during the UN climate conference known as COP29. Join Grist’s Jake Bittle in conversation with participants and experts about where global climate negotiations go from here. Register here.
The essence of the Paris climate agreement has been distilled into a single number. The nearly 200 countries that signed the agreement in 2016 agreed they would try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Over the past decade, as these countries have commissioned renewable energy installations and coal plants, we have been able to evaluate their efforts against this number. (The results did not promising.)
But the 1.5 degree target was only one element of the Paris Agreement. The world has also committed to throwing its weight behind efforts to adapt to the global warming already baked in by centuries of fossil fueled industrialization. Even if emissions fall, over the next century disasters will displace many millions of people and destroy billions of dollars worth of property, especially in developing countries across Africa, Latin America and Asia. Those countries fought to ensure that adaptation to those dangers was a key pillar of the agreement.
But there is no way to measure the success of this commitment. Should the UN measure the number of deaths from disasters, or the value of property destroyed in floods, or the incidence of hunger, or the availability of clean water? How will the international community assess the effectiveness of adaptation measures such as sea walls and drought-resistant crops, given that the disasters they prevent remain so unpredictable?
“There is no single metric that you can use that will apply to all adaptation globally,” said Emilie Beauchamp, an adaptation expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank, which is leading adaptation talks at COP29, this year’s UN Climate Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. “It’s not like when we say, ‘we’re reducing our emissions.’ You can say we need to reduce vulnerability, but it’s going to change depending on whose vulnerability you’re talking about.”
This question is far from academic: Climate change is causing more frequent and severe disasters, devastating places with vulnerable infrastructure. In Zambia, electricity service has been reduced to just a few hours a day thanks to drought draining a key reservoir. Meanwhile, a year’s worth of rainfall inundated the Valencia region of Spain in just a few days last month, causing floods that killed more than 200 people. In the United States, warming has helped soften the intensity of several major hurricanes that have made landfall this year.
Despite its urgency, adaptation has not received much attention at recent UN climate talks. This year’s COP is no exception. While the conferences often begin with rich countries making major new funding pledges, this year just $60 million in new pledges went to the world’s largest adaptation fund. That total, raised by European nations and South Korea, is well short of the $300 million the fund had hoped to raise.
While the main target of COP29 is a new agreement on a global financial goal – which could end up worth more than a trillion US dollars and is intended to help the developing world with all aspects of the climate fight – rich countries refused to set aside a portion of that target for adaptation, in part because adaptation efforts attract far less private investment than renewable energy. In financial talks, developing countries have called for billions of dollars to be set aside for adaptation – a far cry from the $60 million announced at the start of the conference.
Despite the funding impasse, the world is getting closer finally an attempt to define which can make the difference between life and death for millions of people around the world. The UN is halfway through a two-year effort to finally select “adaptation indicators,” or global benchmarks that will allow each country to measure its climate resilience. This decade-delayed effort to complete the ambitions of the Paris Agreement would, in theory, give the world a way to measure adaptation success.
“We are hopeful,” said Hawwa Nabaaha Nashid, an official at the environment ministry of the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. “If there is a high-quality [outcome]can we answer the question—how well are we adapting and what needs to be done differently?”
There are still big hurdles to clear. The latest text of the adjustment negotiators considered, which appeared early Thursday, left out some priorities of developing countries, but negotiators expressed more optimism about the adjustment item than about other items such as decarbonisation and climate finance.
And the task of choosing indicators is daunting in itself. Last year’s COP agreed on specific target areas for adaptation, including water, health, biodiversity, food, infrastructure, poverty and heritage. But to measure progress in these target areas, negotiators proposed a whopping 10,000 potential indicators. This striking sum highlights just how fluid and context-dependent the notion of “climate adaptation” really is.
Some potential indicators, such as “area of contorta pine” (a European Union proposal on biodiversity) and “number of boreholes drilled” (a water proposal from developing countries) seem far too specific, as most of the world does not significant amounts do not have contorta pines or get their water by drilling boreholes. Others, such as “types of synergies created” seem so vague as to be almost useless. Some, such as “number of mining operations in protected areas reviewed and temporarily suspended” appear to have nothing to do with adaptation to climate disasters.
“By the nature of adaptation being more diffuse and broad, you end up with a multitude of indicators, sub-indicators and criteria,” said Kalim Shah, a professor of environmental science at the University of Delaware who studies small island states such as the Marshall Islands with adaptation planning. “It’s much more diffuse, and maybe that’s part of the problem: too many cooks in the kitchen.”
The big roadblock in these discussions is money. In each negotiation, poor countries have demanded clear language acknowledging that adaptation is impossible without adequate funding, while rich countries have sought to exclude such language and focus on planning and logistics. In the struggle over the indicators, the developing world is seeking a commitment to include an indicator that measures “means of implementation” – in other words, a measure of how capable countries are of carrying out their adaptation plans. It would amount to a recognition that funding and capacity are critical for climate adaptation of any kind, whether it’s building new sand dams for pastoral herders or tracking the spread of dengue fever. But even that recognition appears to be controversial.
“It’s still a big contention,” says Portia Adade Williams, who negotiates adaptation needs on behalf of Ghana. “I’m not sure how we’re going to end this yet. But from a developing country point of view, it would be a complete red line, to have a decision that does not allow us to track [capacity].”
Nashid, from the Maldives, said the country could not consider scaling up its adaptation efforts without more money.
“We have to use up our limited domestic budget to fund our adaptation efforts, which takes away from other priority areas like health care and education,” she told Grist.
The country has used large amounts of reclaimed land to build quasi-artificial islands that can house displaced populations from low-lying islands.
The capacity issue is particularly acute for island countries with small populations, which do not always have the necessary infrastructure to navigate the complex bureaucracy of the multilateral UN funds that support adaptation. These low-lying nations often face an almost existential threat from rising sea levels, so they won’t necessarily benefit from just one capital project paid for by these funds—they have to adapt their entire territories to survive.
“By the time all these little things have happened for you to get the money, the risks have increased,” says Filomena Nelson, an adaptation negotiator from Samoa who works for the secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, an intergovernmental authority that environmental management management. protection over Pacific islands. “It takes forever, it’s complicated, it’s a vicious cycle.”
When negotiators cannot discuss money, adjustment talks tend to get bogged down in the context of the abstract. This was evident this week in Baku, where negotiators in one adaptation talk confronted a multidimensional graph on “transformational adaptation” with three axes: “time”, “changes in paradigms” and “changes in the fundamental characteristics of socio-ecological systems .” That chart was accompanied by another evaluation matrix that looked like a Rubik’s cube, and one observer joked that she wanted it printed on a shirt.
Meanwhile, the need for action only becomes more urgent.
The United Nations’ annual report on adaptation, released just before COP29 began, highlighted the life-or-death importance of an issue that often feels like a forgotten middle child in global climate talks. The UN expert who led the report introduced it saying that “people are already dying, homes and livelihoods are being destroyed, and nature is being assaulted.” The report estimated the unmet need for adaptation investment at up to $359 billion each year. Notably, this need was not expressed in forested acres or wells drilled, but in US dollars.
In recent years, as developed countries have endorsed the idea of a climate-driven damage remediation fund – and as the world is on the verge of breaching the 1.5 degree C threshold set out by the Paris Agreement – some have begun to demise of small island states as an inevitability rather than a possibility. But Nelson said that while some disaster losses are inevitable, Samoa and other countries are not ready to admit they will have to leave their homelands, an outcome many experts fear is likely with 1.5 degrees or more of warming.
“We will not give up our land just because we face these issues,” she said. “That’s where we’re coming from – if we give up now, it sends the wrong signal.”
